Incisive Metal outfit Agalloch focuses on making the most of the little things

As the music recording business continues
to shrink, the music merchandising business continues to grow. In the
last few years, one of the most unusual burgeoning merch trends has been
bands attaching themselves to alcoholic beverages. You can find wines,
beers and liquors whose names and imagery are officially tied to AC/DC,
Pink Floyd, The Police, Motörhead, The Hold Steady, GWAR, Iron Maiden
and Clutch, among others.

Portland, Ore.-rooted Metal quartet
Agalloch just joined this odd club. It happens to take its connection to
booze quite seriously. HammerHeart Brewing Company, a Minnesota
microbrewery, recently launched “Serpensblod,” a small-run, tap-only
beer released mid-June. Created in collaboration with Agalloch, the brew
commemorates the recent release of the band’s fifth album, The Serpent & the Sphere.

In a Facebook post regarding the
beverage, the band’s announcement included the statement, “Please read
for more information about the beer, which we all agree fits with our
music and aesthetic.” Just how do you find a legitimate connection
between the edible and the audible?

Based on the comments of Agalloch guitarist Don Anderson, the process is a lot easier and more intuitive than it sounds.

“We went back and forth and talked about
recipes and things we’d look for in a beer,” Anderson says. “The first
thing we wanted was a smoked beer because of our aesthetic of woodsmoke
and burning incense live, and we thought it should be a dark beer. I
suggested, ‘Why not (age) it in barrels to continue with the smoky wood
feel?’ We wanted it to be relatively high alcohol — maybe 8 percent — so
it’s a very rich beer.”

“(Serpensblod) is not too different from
any other kind of merch, in a sense,” Anderson continues. “We have
nothing to do with fashion, but we make T-shirts. Everything we work on,
whether it’s a T-shirt design, a hoodie, a back patch, a sticker or a
beer, it has to definitely be sincere and honest. We don’t want anything
to come across gimmicky.”

“Sincere,” “honest” and “aesthetic” are
all words Agalloch routinely employs in interviews, emphasizing the
importance of treating its music and image with great care.

Nowadays, the band makes mysterious,
nuanced, generally mid-tempo Folk Metal with elements of Progressive
Metal and Black Metal, a style of music that’s all about meticulous
movements and waiting for the payoff.

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On the whole, the 18-year-old
Agalloch moves at what Anderson calls a “moderate pace,” issuing a new
record every three or four years and touring sporadically.

“(Guitarist John Haughm and I) would
never want anything with our name on (it) to not be 100 percent,”
Anderson says. “We have very high standards for ourselves and our own
lives and how we do things. Even my job as a teacher, I want everything
to be perfect. You put so much money and time and effort into something
that it would be foolish not to make it the best it can be.”

This means always keeping an eye on the
particulars, including the gear the band uses, the album graphics and
layouts orchestrated by Haughm and even the grammar that appears in
materials associated with Agalloch. The image building has paid off as
Agalloch has gradually amassed great credibility within Metal.

Natural imagery is also crucial to
Agalloch: The band hits the stage to burning incense and fog to set the
mood and create an otherworldly experience; the group’s name stems from a
resinous heartwood that’s used for medicinal and beauty purposes; and
on the 2002 record The Mantle, Haughm used a deer skull as a percussion instrument.

Even the “Influences” category on the
band’s Facebook, a space usually reserved for shout-outs to other groups
or genres, cites “woodsmoke, snow, fire, wrought iron, fog, rain,
stone, moss …”

Agalloch isn’t the type to take a direct
route when a more interesting alternative might be available. Anderson
self-identifies Agalloch as a Heavy Metal band, above all, but mentions
Nick Cave and Tom Waits as key inspirations and says the group has
always used films to guide its sound.

“I think the images found in the films of
(Ingmar) Bergman, (Alejandro) Jodorowsky, (Mario) Bava and (Jim)
Jarmusch lend more to the work of Agalloch than any single band,”
Anderson told metal-rules.com in the early 2000s. Because Haughm doesn’t
have any musical training and can’t speak in terms of chords or
harmonies — and both Haughm and Anderson are fans of a lot of the same
films — they resort to referencing visuals. For The Serpent, they mutually referenced Lars Von Trier’s 2011 drama Melancholia a
great deal, which meant “thinking about long, panoramic shots that are
very slow and very black and white,” Anderson says. Those themes do
resonate in The Serpent’s final product — it’s a chilly, unflinching album.

In interviews, Agalloch has also
repeatedly spoken of wiping the slate clean with every record so as to
not directly link one album to the next. This effect is accomplished by
spending time away from each other between records. Though the group’s
official homebase is Portland, the band members are geographically
scattered nowadays, regrouping often enough to not sink the project.
Flexibility has created stability. As the band nears its 20th
anniversary, Anderson is beginning to notice Agalloch’s age but still
finds its perks.

“I’m seeing (our age) in reviews (with)
people using words like ‘long-running,’ ‘influential,’ even ‘legendary,’
and it’s nice because with age comes respect,” he says. “You become a
kind of elder. You can’t get that any other way besides time, so that’s a
great feeling. It does feel weird to think that I would be this old and
involved in a whole other career. I feel like I planted this seed back
when I was 17 or 18, and then went off to graduate school and pursued
being a professor, and I turn around and this thing’s bigger than I ever
could have imagined.